Primal Schmooze

Tino Sehgal’s interpreters

Tino Sehgal’s conceptual-art show at the Guggenheim is over, so, finally, let’s discuss. Before last week, when the exhibition closed, that would have been unsporting: there’s a spoiler factor to Sehgal’s works (he calls them “staged situations”), in which actors (“interpreters”) accost the viewer in ways that, depending upon who she is and what she thinks about conceptual art, may leave her confused, annoyed, or more exhilarated than by anything she has encountered inside a museum in years. For the Guggenheim, Sehgal put on a piece called “This Progress.” It begins at the bottom of the museum’s spiral ramp, when a kid bolts from behind a low wall topped with a box of grass—it’s like a duck blind—and asks the visitor, “What is progress?” The kid and the visitor walk together for a while, talking about evolution or forward motion or Facebook, until an older kid appears, taking over the conversation. So it goes, with the ages of the interpreters and the complexity of their prompts ascending up the ramp. The experience invites confession. In the aggregate, the piece might be thought of as a collective unburdening of New York City. One interpreter dubbed it “the primal schmooze.”

What is a party? The other night, on Ramps 5 and 6, it consisted of more than a hundred of Sehgal’s interpreters, drinking wine from plastic cups and eating samosas. Sehgal had spent months recruiting the interpreters. A producer found one in the locker room of the Midtown Tennis Center. Another was chosen after being overheard talking on the Hampton Jitney. The kids were selected largely on the basis of their ability to carry out instructions. But for the adults the criterion was more of a je-ne-sais-quoi thing—interestingness, basically, as defined by Sehgal. At the party, the interpreters included a translator of Herodotus, a discoverer of plate tectonics, and an upper-middle-aged couple with matching tattoos, on their wrists, of cells undergoing meiosis. They were alike in their fluency, forming a sort of superclass of articulates. It might have been nice to have some truckers in the mix. But the same can be said of New York. “ ‘Evanesce’ is a good verb—one should activate it more,” someone said.

Each interpreter had committed to working twelve hours a week, so the group had struck up a fervid camaraderie. “We were selected by some standard that we wouldn’t have dared level on our usual friendships,” Linda Asher, a seventy-seven-year-old interpreter, said. The teen-agers had started calling the old people “wizards.” Bob Stein and Ashton Applewhite, the couple with the tattoos, were planning to throw a dance party, at their house in Williamsburg, for the teens and the adults, at which Julia Simpson, a “generational manager”—she nudged the kids out from their duck blind—would d.j. Asked about the highlights of his stint, Bob Stein replied, “I have an answer that will piss Tino off. The most interesting conversations I’ve had are with the people in the piece.” It felt like the last day of camp, when a group of people who have gone through a rich experience together vow to keep up its momentum, and grow a little sad realizing the likelihood that they will not.

The appeal of the interpreters had not been lost on the public, and the upper ramps of the museum had turned into a bit of a pickup spot. Harriet Lyons, a white-haired interpreter with a ruby-slippers pin on her lapel, admitted to having flirted with an eighty-three-year-old visitor. “I started it,” she said. “I said, ‘Gee, how old are you? You look great for your age.’ And he says, ‘Babe, you don’t look too bad yourself.’ On Craigslist, an ad had appeared in the Missed Connections section, addressed to ‘Tino Sehgal performer. Pink yellow blue striped sweater.’ It read, ‘I know this is really insane but I thought you were really cute.’ ”

The interpreters had grown attached to their audience, too.

“Remember that Italian guy?”

“Tall? Curly hair?”

“Yes, but with just a slight accent.”

“He was amazing!”

One of the interpreters was distributing copies of a sheet titled “What I Heard in ‘This Progress.’ ” The things the interpreters heard: “that there is good progress and bad progress,” “that South Koreans are early adopters,” “that salamanders change colors for sexual reasons,” “that schools today no longer teach cursive writing,” “that the smaller the diamond, the better the marriage,” “that Mr. Hitler ruined my childhood,” “that if I could time-travel I would go back to college and try to fix the thing I don’t want to talk about,” “that she is the masochist in our relationship,” “that everyone in my family except me has seen a ghost.” The conversation spanned generations and continents, Johnny Weir, Seneca, Dante, Chatroulette, Foucault. For a non-interpreter, contemplating it elicited a sort of retroactive cocktail-party anxiety, and also awe at the interestingness of her fellow-citizens. David Hamburger, a seventeen-year-old interpreter, wearing a T-shirt that featured the elephant god Ganesh, had met five hundred new people. “After a while, you learn to sniff out a good convo,” he said. ♦

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